Ep 1: Justifying a Conference to Leadership
Get a behind the scenes look at how the AudiencePlus team justified Goldenhour at such an early stage, why you might want to, and how to get it done.
What do you think he's saying in there?
He's telling the board that we want to create the biggest marketing event in
the industry.
Huge!
What do you think they're saying?
But telling them a way to where they'd pull this off.
It's not too early.
What do you think he said?
That we need to take big swings.
Big swings.
Oh man.
I wonder what they said.
They said, of course we need to take big swings.
But this is crazy.
We're crazy!
You're right.
I've had just a bloodbath in there.
Never thought of.
Well that was easy.
I guess we read that all wrong.
I guess we did.
No! Sleep! Tell!
Workways!
We are evangelizing a new playbook for marketing.
And in this new playbook we're suggesting that actual
exchange of value, education, relationships, you know, these are the things
that ultimately drive revenue.
If you can build a connection with an audience through a variety of different
means,
that's going to be the key to success moving forward.
So part of it was we had to walk the walk.
And I think events are a core part of how we do that.
We have some experience now having done some events.
We hosted a three city road show when we were only a few months old as a
company.
We did our big launch event as well.
Virtually had like thousands of people kind of attend that which was awesome.
We did an executive conference that had like $100 billion of market cap in the
room.
I definitely, at my heart of hearts, feel like I am an event marketer disguised
as a CMO disguised as a founder CEO now.
And having built a program like this at GainSight at the same level of maturity
In fact, we were even earlier at GainSight when we hosted the first Pulse
Conference.
Where can you find over 2,000 litres in the customer success industry under one
roof right on the San Francisco Bay?
It can only have been a pause.
When the industry comes together once a year to celebrate all things customer
success.
Incredible journey seeing this grow this year about 10x what it was in year 1
back in 2013.
So it's really, really good just that.
We're a small but mighty TK runs marketing for us.
We worked together at Hopin' before.
I think he's one of the smartest demand growth marketers I've ever worked with.
Now running kind of the entire show for us at Audience Plus.
Somehow we were able to recruit Todd Clouser, known as the worst marketer in
the world.
But I've known him as anything but that.
We bring a lot of the B2C creator like kind of DNA into the culture.
Amanda's are founding sales rep really helping us mature our kind of go-to-
market strategy, drive growth.
Ruben and Elaine are our customer success team.
What's interesting about Ruben and Elaine they both were at GainSight and they
saw Pulse from our first conference there from the early days.
And all that it's impacted.
And so I think they're kind of like you're crazy but we get it like keep going.
My initial thought was to laugh out loud but I held it inside of me.
I smiled and I recalled what this extraordinary marketer had done at GainSight
and I was like yeah why not.
In some ways we have to practice what we preach so in that way it made perfect
sense.
I still thought it was crazy.
Talking to the board about hosting a conference when you're less than a million
of there are.
A team of eight full-time employees.
It's not exactly like the obvious play to run necessarily.
They knew what they were sort of investing in with me right.
They knew that this was the thing that I was uniquely good at doing.
I may not be the best product marketer.
I may not be the best you know even demand marketer at the end of the day.
But if I had a vision for something on the creative events brand side we've got
a playbook and a track record of success.
And I think that's why it was a little bit of an easier conversation.
This is going to be the greatest conference marketers have seen since HubSpot
introduced Inbound.
Since Inbound started a decade ago.
There's been no innovation in the conference space.
By hosting an industry conference you're aligning your brand with a movement
that is bigger than just your products and services.
You're building authentic relationships with prospects, customers and partners.
And you're giving your internal team a milestone on the calendar where every
year they can calibrate against.
For everything from product readiness to customer love.
But if hosting a conference can be so meaningful why do we have such a hard
time convincing our stakeholders that it's a good idea?
How can we create language around the value of hosting events in context of
today's marketing reality?
Here's how I would think about it.
First, events spark movements.
All of us are battling for the attention of our audience.
And one of the hardest challenges marketers face is defining a strategic brand
narrative that has emotional resonance with their buyer audience.
Events unlike any other program enable marketers to activate that messaging to
align their brand with that story.
And probably the most powerful outcome to gather the voices of a community who
validate that narrative as true.
How do we have to say all the creators are here. It's a big space to be right
now in the creative world.
And if you're on LinkedIn and you are creating content and you're not here you
're missing out.
Validating your market leadership as the brand at the helm of the movement.
Owned Media gives people the opportunity to stand out like never before.
A guy like me can get dressed up in a silly costume and make a difference.
That's not something I would be able to do on networks that exist without
platforms like Audience Plus.
It gives a voice to smaller creators like never before.
Events drive pipeline.
I think it's a much easier sell or at minimum a compelling reason to reach out
to get a prospect to attend a thought leadership event rather than taking a
demo.
There's an explicit exchange of value there.
And conferences represent an incredible opportunity to fill the room with
prospects, whether they're warm or cold,
and to curate moments that build relationship with them on site.
Events close deals.
The research shows that there's a 10x improvement in close rate for prospects
who attend a conference versus non-attendees.
I'd sell stakeholders on the idea of setting a meeting target for every
pipeline account who will be there to host breakout dinners for prospects and
other field marketing activations.
Events build the partner ecosystem.
You can't really host an industry conference on your own.
These programs represent an amazing opportunity to activate the partner channel
with your brand at the center of the ecosystem.
There's an incredible amount of hype around this event, so many incredible
marketers, a team that has a track record of putting on incredible events.
The only thing that helped me back is I heard the world's worst marketer was
here as well, Todd.
So I was like, do I really want to go?
But then the answer was absolutely yes.
So Apollo's really happy to be here.
We're happy to sponsor.
We're happy to partner.
Partners make for great exhibitors and speakers, and their participation helps
both drive net new attendees from their auditions.
As well as offset the expenses of putting the event on.
Finally, events impact customer retention.
We saw some data at GainSight that after six years of hosting the Pulse
conference, any customers who did not attend our event had a higher propensity
to churn.
That's because events enable the CS team to build real human relationships with
our customers, to celebrate them as the heroes in our community, and ultimately
to help strengthen their decision embedding on your own.
As people are walking into the general session room, the energy is high.
The music is blasting.
The voice of God tells people the show is about to begin.
There's this kinetic energy in the room that's crescendoing towards a big
moment.
So you can't just hard pivot from that to talking about enterprise software.
Over the years with Pulse, we had some crazy news.
We had some crazy ideas to transition the audience into the opening keynote.
From hiring a Taylor Swift impersonator to perform a song,
To a friend's skit featuring doppelganger actors,
To my personal favorite, a surprise vanilla ice performance.
What a great event.
There's a great way to keep morale and keep everybody energized and to invite
us out and bring back the 90s.
It was just a great little experience for a lot of people.
Create a moment that lives up to the energy you're creating in the room and
successfully transitions your audience into the opening keynote.
Now Golden Hour being a first year event with a first year event budget to boot
We took a bit of a safer route for the opening moment.
We had been running a campaign for the last year or so called emo marketing,
Where we'd rewrite the words to popular punk songs from the early 2000s
To create empathy with just how hard marketing is in 2024.
And since Golden Hour was being hosted in Brooklyn,
There was an opportunity to lean into that and bring that similar kind of video
moment around a song from pop culture that's centered on Brooklyn.
We have a core value of a childlike joy.
And our thought here is we're doing this work thing for a lot of our lives.
We want to make sure that we bring joy into everything that we do.
At our launch event in May, we had Daniel official who is Topanga from Boy Me
ets World,
Be Our Host.
And it was just an amazing like nostalgic moment, especially for our audience
who grew up watching that show.
Hello, I'm Danielle.
You look just like her.
Wow.
That's because I am her.
Method actor, guys.
So what's your real name?
No.
Danielle, I really am her.
It's just going to be a story to work with.
She's great.
JK, by the way, she's great.
She looks just like her.
What?
She's actually...
Oh.
This is awkward.
I'm sorry.
Can I get you something?
You know what?
I would love a water.
Water.
Got it.
I think it's...
I'll be right back.
Okay.
You know what?
I think we should start the show.
And so, what can we do that's going to just be joyful and amazing and we're
like, "Well, we're going to be in Brooklyn."
No sleep until Brooklyn.
Big last year, make a much disappear.
Team Rod and Lena and our target's not clear.
My CEO from Stas is efficient growth time.
It's been three months since I spent the time.
No, I won't stop me.
Give our sight enough.
Great.
Gertrude, leave for a less than 10.
We're changing B2B content.
What else is doing this?
How does changing B2B content actually make you money?
You know the amount of...
People are going to see this content.
They're going to want to know what the heck we do.
Guess if it fails?
We can start looking for jobs, but honestly, I'm not too concerned about that.
Things are extremely hard.
We're halfway through the month.
No deals forecasted.
Golden Hour, we are behind on registrations, behind on sponsorship revenue.
So we got to figure out what we're going to do.
None of what's on the board is insurmountable.
There isn't anything that any other company hasn't faced or isn't facing right
now,
so we're also not alone.
Definitely not alone.
To your point, Zev.
So whatever you've been through and whatever you're going through now, you're
not alone.
Events like this are little helpful reminders that you are not alone in the
challenges that you may be facing at work.
At worst, we can be alone together.
together.